Penser le Présent with Frederick Wiseman

At a time when the two-part retrospective Frederick Wiseman - Nos humanités is being organized by the Centre Pompidou, students from Angelica Mesiti's studio with Marion Naccache propose a dialogue with the filmmaker on his masterful work.

Wiseman's cinema, through its institutions and social explorations, captures the world in its paradoxes, alternating with subtlety, gravity and humor, and eliciting a wide range of emotions. Avoiding classic documentary conventions, Wiseman places human accuracy and complexity at the heart of his films, exploring universal themes such as dignity, equality and inclusion.

Frederick Wiseman began his career in the early 60s, teaching forensic medicine and law at Boston University. Parallel to his teaching activities, he published “Psychiatry and Law: Use and Abuse of Psychiatry in a Murder Case” in the American Journal of Psychiatry (1961) and co-authored the “Implementation” section of the Report of the President Commission of Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice.
He suddenly gave up law to devote himself to cinema, and more specifically to documentaries. His first film, Titicut Follies (1967), about the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, set the style and approach for his entire body of work.
In contrast to the American documentary school, in each “Reality Fiction”, as he calls it, he sets out to observe how an institution operates, and to study “the complex relationships that man has with the institutions that reflect his values and determine his existence” (Thomas R. Atkins in Frederick Wiseman; Monarch Press, 1976), without any explanatory commentary or interviews.

In the 70s, he focused on the dramatic and inhuman effects of bureaucracy in Law and Order, Juvenile court, and Welfare.
In the 80s, he tackled the influence of American consumer society on the world in The Store, Model and Sinai Field Mission, while Blind, Deaf, Multi-Handicapped and On the Brink of Death dealt with physical handicaps and their impact on the mind.
In the 90s, he returned to social themes with Public Housing (1997), about the misery of a black ghetto in Chicago, Belfast, Maine (1999) and Domestic Violence (2001).
In 2002, after receiving dozens of awards worldwide for his documentaries, he shot his first fiction film, The Last Letter, about the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War. The subjects of his latest films: the Lord's Gym boxing club (2010), Crazy Horse (2011), UC Berkeley (2013), the National Gallery (2014), Jackson Heights Quarter (2015) and the New York Public Library (2017).